Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not life.

Monday, May 23, 2016

A methodology for analysis of pop lyrics - justification

During my OU degree, I chose to do short project looking at the linguistic characteristics of pop lyrics. I felt this was worthy of further study, and would like to come back to it. As part of the prologue of this process, it's important to work out how exactly the language is going to be analysed. I've extracted and edited what follows from the short paper that I wrote.

Music
is a form of artistic expression that is produced in the context of a
particular culture. "Pop music" doesn't have a single clear
definition, but is typically represented by music made available as "singles"
– single-track records, or individual downloads. For many years, it
has reflected and also helped to define a certain strand of particularly Western culture.

Despite
the cultural significance of song lyrics, they have largely remained
uninvestigated from a corpus linguistic perspective. According to Kreyer and
Mukherjee, they have "not been included in any of the standard
reference corpora". Some preliminary investigations have been carried out, but little attempt has apparently been made to describe the linguistic
characteristics of pop lyrics. Such an analysis would provide a
reference point for considering the location of individual lyrics
within the genre. Given the close relationship between pop lyrics and
culture, it is possible that song lyrics might provide a proxy for
measuring cultural phenomena. This was an approach taken by DeWall et al.

Linguistically,
pop music lyrics have characteristics that are different from other
forms of language use. The
medium itself is focussed on music, particularly rhythm, melody
and form, and the lyrics might be considered subordinate to this.
Individual song lyrics tend to be highly repetitive and relatively
short. Although songs are written, rehearsed and edited, which ought
to result in texts characteristic of written modes, the choice of language is often
colloquial, stylised and limited – this being more typical of
spontaneous forms of language use, such as conversation. The choice of themes is
conventionally narrow. However, song lyrics are widely quoted beyond
the context of their song, frequently have powerful emotional
resonance, and consequently have a cultural weight in sections of
society that few other forms of discourse manage. This cultural
significance makes song lyrics worthy of investigation.